TEN

Silence is Better than Holiness

She moved to the edge of the big bed. After last night with the Japanese businessman, she didn’t feel like being touched, even by accident. She might have dozed an hour or two somewhere in the night, but it hadn’t helped her exhaustion. She was beginning to realize that there were a whole lot of things in L.A. that were pretty much unheard of in the Owens Valley. And the adult industry or hostess industry, or whatever, wasn’t turning out as easy a career as she’d figured.

She rolled onto her side, so she didn’t even have to see Keith where he lay snoring, the sheet tucked up to his cute cleft chin. The curtains were wide open, and the sky was beginning to lighten up out over the restless Malibu ocean when there was a loud crash of glass, like a brick going through a window in the next room. Keith sat up in bed beside her like a jack-in-the-box, his eyes crazy as a cat’s, and he took a second to get oriented.

“Was that real?” he asked softly. There was doubt and anxiety in his voice that she’d never heard there before. “Was it?”

“I heard it.”

He yanked open a bedside table and came out with a big steel pistol with a long barrel, just as the bedroom door slammed open. The tallest Jamaican she’d ever seen came in first. At least she was pretty sure he was Jamaican because of the red-green-black knit cap and the striped yellow trousers—she’d seen a Jamaican movie on TV once and they all dressed like that. He also carried a little gray machine gun. The stocky white man behind him had his head shaved and his ears stuck straight out. He wore a fancy white linen suit like he was from somewhere in the tropics, too.

“Drop dat naow an’ tek you hands up, Keity!”

Keith and the Jamaican pointed their weapons at one another for a moment, but neither looked very much like firing, at least she hoped so. She held the sheet up to her neck and prayed to all her ancestors to make her as invisible as Hawk in low morning cloud.

“Keith, don’t be such a fucking pain,” the bald man said.

“Levine, sorry. I guess I didn’t recognize your knock. I hope you’re going to pay for the glass.” Keith let his pistol droop.

The bald man looked at his empty hands, as if inspecting his manicure, then back at Keith. “Just shut up. You’re the guy wanted to graduate to peddling skezag to all your movie pals. Ain’t that the truth, Terror?”

“First ting, he don’ even be payin’ on time for all the coke-a-moke, den he get him forward on the H. Get ready fe tek some blows, K. I-and-I ready.” He moved forward menacingly.

The bald man put a palm on the Jamaican’s shoulder lightly to steady him. “That may not be necessary, Terr. I believe our man Keith is a paragon of honor, and he has already approached a select circle of responsible people in the fuck-movie world, where King H has been experiencing a small renaissance of late— the randy bunch liking to go all noddy and like, though mostly it’s for snorting, I bet. I’m sure he has our money all ready for us. Bundled and counted.”

“Today, Levine. I swear. There won’t be any trouble. By noon.”

“To-day.” Levine tried the syllables out a couple of times in his mouth, as if the word’s meaning might become more evident with unusual emphasis. “Perhaps you’d better explain this to my man Pennycooke here.”

“The deal’s all set up, honest to God. I just got to deliver the skag and cop the money. Man, look, porn is so marginal there’s always money somewhere, but it’s sometimes a little slow to eke out.”

“Eke.” The bald man tried that word on, too. “Where I come from, money doesn’t eke, Keithie. Did money eke back in Trench-town, Terror?”

“Money in de han, dat’s de onliest money. Man say, money go be slow, I say, dem be wicked, and I-an-I boun fe harm de wicked man.”

“Yes, we agree. Who’s the cute little cunt?” His eyes had flicked to Luisa, and she cowered, unable to help herself.

“One of my girls. She was a hostess at the game expo last night.”

“She’s worth something to you then. Collateral, shall we say. I think we’ll keep her until that money ekes into our hands.” He wrenched off the sheet, and Luisa, wearing only a T-shirt, covered herself as well as she could with her hands. The night before, she’d decided against wearing the black lace nightgown, the only sleep-wear he’d provided. She hadn’t felt like wearing anything even remotely seductive.

“Don’t, Levine, please.”

With the sheet yanked away, Keith was buck naked, and Levine was looking down at Keith’s crotch, at a large uncircumcised penis.

“Rumor had it you were somewhere between a Holmes and a Wahlberg. I’d say a point-seven Holmes.” He seemed to note with amusement that Keith was unable to keep the fright from showing in his eyes. “How’d you end up uncircumcised, K? I’m curious.”

“I was born in Germany. They don’t do it in Europe so much.”

The bald man looked thoughtful. “Don’t you think it’s about time? For the sake of personal hygiene alone. What do you say, Tyrone?”

“I-and-I, me tinkin’ dred.”

“Yeah, me, too,” the bald man said.

The Jamaican drew out an old-fashioned straight razor and flipped it open.

“Man, I’ll get your money today, I swear!”

The bald man pointed straight at Luisa. “You, stand over there.”

She did exactly as he asked, climbing out of the bed and huddling in the corner, forgetting entirely about modesty. She had a horror of that straight razor and the kind of clean cuts it could make deep through your skin. Long ago, she had seen two distant cousins fight with box-cutters and only drunkenness had kept them from killing one another by inches. She tried looking away and noticed that the ocean was sparkly with reflected sun now, and had a light morning chop under a streaky sky.

“No, man, no! Don’t!”

The bald man knelt on the edge of the bed and placed his big hand hard around Keith’s throat, pressing down with all his weight. “Don’t thrash, son. You’ll make it worse.”

Luisa’s eyes were drawn irresistibly back as the Jamaican reached out and took Keith’s long penis in his fist like the handle of a baseball bat and tested the razor in the air, making little limp-wristed arcing cuts, practicing near the tip of the penis.

“I beg you guys …”

“Hush, now.”

Then in one swift circling motion, he excised Keith’s foreskin, if not a bit more. Keith screamed, a cry of both horror and pain, and he kicked out spasmodically with his legs and slapped the bed with his palms, but it was already over. With the bald man still holding Keith’s neck, the Jamaican picked up the detached and blooded foreskin, studied it impassively, and thumbed it into Keith’s open bellowing mouth.

The bald man let go, and Keith spit and sputtered and then clutched at his bleeding penis with both hands, still wailing in pain.

“Today, Keith. You eke that money our way. We’ll keep your cute little friend until you do. I’m sure you understand.”

“Let’s go, let’s go,” the director improbably named Ram Gold chanted. “Time is moolah.”

The blonde woman in the two-gun cowgirl outfit, little more than an open vest and denim miniskirt, made a puzzled face.

“We paid a fortune for this standing set, Miss Why-not Earp, and I want one tracking shot to make it all worthwhile. You just hop back to the saloon and flash us from the door again.”

A big black man tugged a rubber-tired platform back about fifty feet in the dusty street. A cameraman with a Van Dyke beard sat cross-legged on the wheeled platform with a small video camera in his lap.

Jack Liffey waited for a break, staying out of shot. He had found them on Monogram Village Road, a dirt track not far off the undeveloped part of Mulholland in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. A decaying false-front cowtown had been built there decades ago, in the golden age of the Western, saloon, hotel, jail, etc. But it looked like Hollywood had given up on this particular back lot decades ago and big chunks of plaster were spalling away to show the unlikely framing and chickenwire underneath.

“Roll tape.”

“Speed, dude.”

“Flash ‘em at us good. You’re telling us you’re the best. Then march down here. Action!”

The big blonde came out the swing doors and tore open her snap-button cowboy vest toward the camera, and then she walked clumsily along the boardwalk toward the steps down. She tripped a little on the bottom step.

“Keep going, keep going, we’ll get cover.”

She stalked purposefully up the street, with the wheeled platform retreating just ahead of her, pulled along by the burly man.

“Draw and fire.”

She fumbled a bit getting the pistols out, but both blanks went off, aimed rather askance.

“Cut. Star it. Okay, we can set up for the reverse. Take a break, Trish. You guys know where Sandy’s gonna be.”

“Can I smoke?” the cowgirl asked.

“You’re not in the next shot. You can go practice feng shui for all I care.”

He turned and saw Jack Liffey approaching, taking note of him with a kind of relief and pleasure, like acknowledging a grown-up entering a playroom of unruly infants. “Temperament, the last refuge of the brain whacked. But you watch my guys move. A feature crew would take an hour and a half to relight and move the reflectors. And then they’d still be re-laying the dolly tracks …” He threw up his hands in a gesture somewhere between exultation and despair.

Jack Liffey could tell the director was freewheeling on something, and he realized he’d been mistaken for somebody important, a producer or someone connected with the backlot. Maybe somebody connected with the financing. “So we use the doorway dolly. Some guys use a wheelchair, but that’s really down the chickenshit end of things.”

“Luisa Wilson,” Jack Liffey said, holding up a photograph. “Somebody was supposed to call about her.”

“Okay.” He wound down a bit, and took the photo to look at it. “Uh-huh. She was here, all right, a week ago.”

Jack Liffey waited. There was obviously more to come.

“This girl was right off the farm, all soap and water. Rod, my AD, brought her in. She did a day’s work on the set and then our extracurricular courier Keith took her away from Rod, nothing he could do, he said. If you wait around, Keith will roll in here like the roach coach in a few minutes, ready to service every appetite.”

“Where’s Rod?” Jack Liffey asked.

The director shrugged. “Off on his own Games project too much. I had to fire him. It’s Keith you want.”

Somebody whistled, and he looked around.

“Danny,” he yelled, “get Dyke Clanton. It’s shot 30A.”

A skinny man in a tie-dyed shirt waved and trotted off and soon came back with another woman in cowboy attire, even larger breasted than the first one, if that was possible. He turned her shoulders against the sun, and a young man with a baseball cap that said Baseball Cap squatted down nearby and untwisted a big gold reflector and moved it around until he found where it washed the sunlight over her.

The director turned back on Jack Liffey abruptly. “Look, she was a good kid, and I tried to give her a hand. You can fall a lot lower than sex films in this town. Some days, I think our work is even holy. Some days, I’m the last juvenile delinquent. Okay, I admit to a certain level of bad faith in the air.” The man’s head was speeding somewhere, on something.

He turned away suddenly and began framing things with a rectangle made of his fingers. “Maybe I can do some good in a bad place,” he said and Jack Liffey wasn’t sure who he was talking to. “My guru told me that we never get to fight any of the big battles on a field of purity, but only where things are already debased.”

“That’s the worst rationalization I’ve ever heard,” Jack Liffey said.

Ram Gold laughed. “Which proves that silence is usually better than holiness. Where’s Jimmie now?” he bellowed. “Where’s makeup? Will people please stop wandering away!”

But Keith didn’t show up on schedule with their nose candy, and he wasn’t answering his pager either. Jack Liffey didn’t particularly want to hang around the set any longer. Obviously neither Rod nor Keith was coming.

“You think he’ll be in tomorrow?”

“Wherever there are still human needs to fill.”

Jack Liffey could either go down the hill to Malibu and then along PCH or over the top to the Valley and 101, and it was just about as fast back to East L.A. either way, but going by the ocean he got to see the water for a while. It was too cold for anybody but surfers in wetsuits and a few hardy sunbathers. It was probably not too bad, though, lying down out of the wind, he guessed. A small plane towed an advertising banner along the beach, but the number of bathers on the strand didn’t seem to make the effort worthwhile.

Slowly the plane caught up with his car on PCH, and he chanced a long look over his shoulder on the twists and sweeping curves. They were individual letters, wired together, floating along behind the small plane: TRISH IS A BUTTHEAD.

There was a second plane far back, towing another banner. He wondered if it rhymed but he’d forgotten all about it by the time he’d passed the Incline and come into Santa Monica.

Nobody he tried at the Adult Entertainment Coalition knew anything about a Keith who sometimes provided financing. He guessed the police could come up with Keith’s address if he wanted to go that route. Thinking of the police reminded him that Thumb Estrada was due to show up to mow his lawn at noon. He got the old push mower out and sharpened the blade with a hand stone, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized a voluntary appearance by the boy was pretty unlikely.

“Your friend a no-show?” Gloria leaned out the door, waggling a glass of lemonade at him.

“It’s beginning to look like it.” He still hadn’t told her who Thumb Estrada was. He was afraid she’d be obliged as a cop to turn the boy in, and though he didn’t have a clue why he’d spared him, he’d made his decision to drag the boy kicking and screaming into a civil world, and he meant to stick to it, even if he had to go round him up bodily to start the process.

“You made this off the tree in back, didn’t you? We ought to set up a little booth out here and sell it in the neighborhood for a nickel a glass,” he mused.

“That was your ideal childhood that never happened, Mr. Anglo Middle Class. My ideal childhood that never happened was a quinceañera gown all in white and big hair and a sea of white roses.”

He put an arm around her. “You never got your gown?”

“My fosters couldn’t afford it, not on the $300 a month the county gave them. The whole point of their scam was living off the kids. The cheaper the upkeep, the more to keep.”

“Ah, shit. Was it really bad?”

She stared at him. “It was worse. Let it go. Do you think this thing still works?” A cheap old Polaroid camera dangled from its lanyard off her left wrist, clunky as a toaster.

“They’ve been pretty well wiped out by digitals, but I think you can still get the film. What do you want to shoot?”

“You,” she said.

“Why?”

“I want to make a collection of the different kinds of shit-eating grins you get on your face when you’re lying to me.”